It's increasingly rare for Congress to actually pass bills into law, but Friday brought some good news from Capitol Hill: More than a year after the exemption covering phone unlocking expired and a White House petition on the topic collected some 114,000 signatures, a narrow bill offering a limited carve-out for consumers unlocking phones made its way to the President's desk to be signed into law.

As a refresher: the notion that phone unlocking might violate copyright law comes from an ill-conceived section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prevents the circumvention of technical measures around copyrighted works. If such measures are understood to include restrictions on phone software, then unlocking may violate the DMCA—an outcome Congress never intended.

Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities. Most of the time they don’t, and the world gets a valuable public service of simple, ubiquitous Internet access.

If you say anything remotely critical about the Ecuadorian government, you may face a copyright takedown. A shady law firm in Spain called Ares Rights has been sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices on behalf of several Ecuadorian state officials, targeting documentaries, tweets, and search results that include images of those officials, alleging copyright infringement. Most of the companies receiving these requests, including Google, Twitter, and Vimeo, have unfortunately responded by automatically removing the content. Some have re-instated removed works after a successful counter-notice was filed by the uploaders.